Buying Vintage Beer

By Jay R. Brooks Published January 2012, Volume 32, Number 6

You don’t necessarily have to age beer yourself. You can find people willing to do it for you: for a price. A growing trend among better beer bars and specialty bottle shops is to have their own beer cellars from which to offer vintage beer for sale. Older beers, naturally, is priced higher than newer beers and it may even be possible to do a vertical flight at a particular bar, assuming they’ve collected enough vintages of the same beer. Below are just a few we know about, there are many others, and the list is growing every day. Be sure to ask at your favorite beer spot whether or not they sell vintage beer.

The Beer Stein (Eugene, Oregon)
Belmont Station (Portland, Oregon)
Bottleworks (Seattle, Washington)
Ebeneezer’s Pub (Lovell, Maine)
The Farmhouse (Emmaus, Pennsylvania)
The Happy Gnome (St. Paul, Minnesota)
Kulminator (Antwerp, Belgium)
Lost Abbey’s Taproom (San Marcos, California)
Memphis Taproom (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Monk’s Cafe (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Sam’s Quik Shop (Durham, NC)
Sergio’s World Beers (Louisville, Kentucky)
Toronado (San Francisco, CA)

Jay R. Brooks has been writing about beer for 20 years and enjoying it far longer. He currently writes a syndicated newspaper column, Brooks on Beer, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications. Online, he can be found drinking and rambling at his idiosyncratic Brookston Beer Bulletin from his home in Marin County, California.

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